We Can Be Mended (Divergent fanfic)

Chapter 8 - Torture

(Tris)
We sit in silence for a long time. It could be seconds, it could be hours for all I know. Six years in a cell have made me lose track of passing time. An awkward silence stretches out between us, the outburst of affection from a moment ago forgotten. I want to tell him the truth. I want to tell him everything. Every horrific memory from the last six years of torture. I want to explain the series of endless simulations, some lasting for days. I want to share the pain of the never ending experiments on my brain, each one driving me a little further down the road to insanity. But my thoughts are jumbled up in one messy heap, so I cannot put a single one in to words.
Tobias waits. I can feel his eyes on me expectantly, waiting for me to explain how, after six years of supposedly being dead, I am now sitting in front of him. The truth is I do not really know what to tell him. His gaze burns my skin. I can feel him looking inside me, in to the deepest depths of my soul and whilst part of me wants to open up and let him see it, another part of me refuses to trust him with such awful secrets.
Distantly I hear him say my name, but I am lost in my mind. It is not like I am used to company anymore. I don't think doctors poking around in my brain really count as company.
Finally I find it in me to look up at him. He is the same Tobias that I knew, but his eyes are tired and I can see the years of grief in his face. But he is still the most beautiful person I have ever seen. His deep blue eyes meet mine. They are expectant but gentle. Not pressing me. Just waiting.
I sigh, "I can't explain everything tonight."
He nods, "You don't have to tell me anything yet. If you want to just go to sleep then-"
"No." I interrupt, I know he means what he says but the desperation to know, to understand or to just make sure that this is real, is evident in his tone. "You deserve to know the truth after all this time."
I open my mouth to speak, not sure at first what I plan to say, but then I start talking and everything comes out. I tell him the real story of my death, how David shot me but only in my lower back. The blood loss was enough to knock me out, just after i released the memory serum, thinking that it would affect David. What none of us had predicted was that when David worked out that I was up to something, he took precautions. Not only did he inoculate himself against the death serum, but also against memory serum. After almost killing me, he decided I was more use to him if I was alive, given the strength of my divergence. There were only a small number of people who were not affected by the memory serum, but it was enough to establish an illegal organisation, just outside of Chicago, that tested new ways to speed up the healing of 'damaged' genes. I just happened to be their test subject.

All of this I tell Tobias and I watch his expressions change as I speak. The anger he feels towards them, on my behalf, the way he feels my pain, it makes the years that have been lost press together until it feels like only days since we woke up together on that couch in the bureau. The memory makes my cheeks flush.
Explaining my kidnapping comes naturally to me once I start talking. That may sound odd, but compared to what came next, it is nothing.
It is the years of simulations and testing that is hard to describe without breaking down at the memory. I am not sure if I cry, when I tell him how they strapped my thrashing limbs to an operating table and injected me with serum after serum, another false reality waiting as soon as I forced myself from the last, until eventually I stopped trying and just stayed in the simulations. Even now I find it hard to distinguish between reality and the hallucinations they conjure up for me. For all I know this could be another one.
The simulations were not even the worst part though. Nor the experiments or needles or constant extraction of DNA. The worst part was the isolation. For six years I spoke to no one but my torturers, which was hardly gentle chit chat. I am surprised I even know how to speak now. Even when I wasn't in a simulation, I spent my time living an alternate reality with Tobias. Refusing to see the situation I was in. Refusing to let myself believe that that was all there was, for fear of giving up. Because in all that time, I never gave up hope. I would have given up long ago if it hadn't been for the hope that one day I would be here, reunited with the only person I have ever truly trusted.